Changed money with paypal: first, outside investor in facebook, uh backed palant invested in spacex with seventeen hundred dollars in a tax-free retirement savings account. Peter thiel was ready to take on the traditional corporate world two decades later. He would invest at seventeen hundred dollars to grow it into five billion dollars today. This is the story of how peter thiel multiplied his money by 2.9 million times, which is a percentage gain of over 294 million percent.

When you think of the world's greatest investors, you might think of warren buffett, charlie munger, peter lynch or even kathy wood. However, although he is drowned in political controversy, peter till might just be the world's greatest investor born in 1967. In frankfurt, germany peter moved with his family to the united states. At one year of age, at the age of six he began playing chess and by age 12.

He was already ranked seventh in the u.s in the under 13 division. In addition to being a chess star, he was also a math prodigy and successful student in middle school. He received the highest score in a statewide math competition before graduating from san mateo high school in 1985. He was also named as a valedictorian of his class, while still in high school, he had a large sticker on his chessboard kit.

That said, three words born to win. If anyone was born to win, it was definitely peter thiel. If you're starting a company, if you're the founder entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition, and so hence competition is for losers. In 1989.

He graduated from stanford university, with a major in philosophy and in 1992 he received his juris doctor from stanford after obtaining his jd. Teal landed a job as a judicial clerks with judge james larry edmondson, a famous judge, who was once appointed by ronald reagan shortly after he left his job to work as a transactional lawyer at sullivan and cromwell. This was outstanding for his age, as he was already near the top of those with a career in law. However, peter's time as a lawyer didn't last long, peter described the law firm as a place where, on the outside, everyone is trying to get in.

However, on the inside, everyone is trying to get out. He actually thought that law was similar to prison, because working in law is literally a psychological trap. It was one of those places where, from the outside, everybody was trying to get in on the inside. Everybody was trying to get out when i left after seven months and three days.

One of the people down the hall from me, uh told me, was reassuring to see me leave. He had no idea, it was possible to escape from alcatraz and of course all you had to do was go out the front door, but but it was. It was psychologically hard for people to do this because um their identity was so wrapped up in the competitions. They had won the people they had beaten along the way that they could not even imagine doing anything different.

After leaving the law firm, he became a derivatives trader at a credit suisse unit. A derivatives trader is someone who speculates on the future pricing of assets by trading contracts. For example, some derivatives traders speculate on the price of oil by trading oil futures contracts. This time, although peter felt better about it, he still thought that he was out of place in 1996.

Peter left his job in new york to start his own hedge fund in menlo park. California, at the end of his fundraising round, he successfully raised 1 million dollars from his friends and family. His new hedge fund was named teal capital shortly after his life would take a sudden turn after starting his hedge fund, peter met a man named max levchin, who is a programmer from the university of illinois urbana-champaign, which is better known as uiuc max, had an idea To create a cryptography internet company named fieldlink peter thought. The idea had massive potential and wanted to become a co-founder eventually after starting the business bringing in several people and making some minor changes peter and the other co-founders renamed fieldlink, as confinity in march of 2000 confinity merged with x.com another financial services company that was founded By elon musk, so why did peter do this murder? In his own words? Competition is for losers.

A competition is for losers. The merger of confinity and x.com marks the start of paypal, which would have some turbulent changes ahead. Elon musk, who is the president of the company and bill harris? The ceo both disagreed with each other about the future of financial services. As a result, bill left the company in may of 2000 and elon replaced bill as a ceo.

Despite this upheaval, things did not go well. In october, musk began focusing the company on paypal unbeknownst to elon. In the same month, elon musk was suddenly overthrown as a ceo and was replaced by none other than peter thiel. As the new ceo peter took paypal public in 2002 and was later acquired by ebay for 1.5 billion dollars in the same year, peter's equity allowed him to bring home 55 million dollars in the transaction immediately, making him a tech millionaire.

In retrospect, because peter's tax information was recently leaked, we know that the majority of his paypal gains were in his roth ira. A roth ira is a retirement brokerage account where users pay taxes on their capital before depositing and never have to pay taxes on their capital gains. Using his roth ira, peter purchased 1.7 million shares of paypal for a tenth of a penny. Ebay's acquisition was at roughly 22 dollars per share, so this gave him a 22 000 x return.

Ultimately, after selling paypal, peter's roth ira was worth roughly 37 million dollars by my calculations while impressive already. This is nothing compared to the current value of peter's roth ira of 5 billion. After selling paypal peter launched a hedge fund named clarium capital with clarium. He analyzed macroeconomic trends and made large bets on them.

Initially, the performance of the fund was impressive. In 2002, his fund returned 29.4, the next year in 2003 peter successfully foresaw that the dollar would crash, allowing him to return 65.6 percent in his hedge fund that year, these returns continue to fluctuate with massive volatility which i'll cover soon roughly one year after starting clarium. Peter co-founded, another startup with a friend he met while at stanford law, school palantir technologies, initially talented's business model, was so unconventional that nobody in silicon valley wanted to invest in palantir. The business model was simple.

Peter explains that, basically, i thought that some of the approaches that paypal had used to fight fraud could be extended into other contexts like fighting terrorism, while maintaining operations at palantir and clarium peter was still managing to do even more work. In august of 2004, peter became the first investor in facebook, after he initiated a 500 000 angel investment in facebook for 10.2 percent of the company. Eventually, he sold 80 of his angel investment for over 400 million dollars at 20 dollars per share. This solidified his expertise in being a successful startup investor in 2005, peter started founders fund, a venture capital fund based in san francisco in the next six years.

The founders fund grew after successful startup investments, one of which actually included a large investment in the company. He founded palantir during this time. His hedge fund clarium capital, thrived in 2004, clarium capital returned 5.6 percent and in 2005 the fund grew 57.1 percent before declining 7.8 percent in the following year, 2007 was a fantastic year for teal, as the fund returned 40.3 percent. In 2011, peter missed out on a massive rebound in the stock market, which led major investors to pull out their money.

This forced peter to close the fund and focus exclusively on managing his own money. Overall, from 2002 to 2010 peter achieved an average return of 15.3 percent per year. That may not seem like much, but it was actually an extremely impressive return during that same period of time, the s p 500 averaged a return of just 3.32 per year. That means that on average, peter beat the s p 500 by roughly 12 per year, which is absolutely incredible.

The interesting thing with peter is that he not only succeeded in the hedge fund space, but also in venture capital, entrepreneurship and public equity. Investing from 2010 to the present day, peter managed to accelerate his capital substantially. According to a report, investors who invested one dollar in the founders fund in 2011 would have four dollars and 60 cents at the beginning of 2019., that is a 4.6 x increase in eight years and that doesn't even include 2020 or 2021, where we've seen a massive Appreciation in financial assets all across the board, not only that, but that increases after fees, so peter himself likely compounded much higher returns. The founders fund, successful investments include airbnb slide.com, linkedin, yammer, yelp, spotify, spacex, palantir, korra stripe wish lyft twilio facebook and many more.

The founders fund is easily one-off, if not the best venture capital firm of all time when it comes to palantir peter successfully helped the company grow to become one of the largest ai-based companies. Worldwide palantir's revenue has grown from just 2 million dollars in 2008 to over 1 billion dollars in 2020, and this might just be the start of more to come. The ceo of palantir, alex carp, stated that he thinks palacio could become the largest software company in the world as if his schedule couldn't get more packed. Peter thiel was also an author.

In 2014, he released a book alongside stanford graduate blake masters called zero to one, which is a number one new york times bestseller book. I highly recommend zero to one which i will link down below, as it is one of my favorite books of all time and completely debunks traditional thinking on innovation and investing overall at the age of 53 years. Old peter is just getting started with becoming one of the world's greatest investors. He has already dominated venture capital entrepreneurship, hedge funds and more not only that but he's just getting started.

Peter's net worth is estimated to be a 7.24 billion dollars by bloomberg, but he definitely could be worth much more than that. Peter enjoys having an undercover lifestyle and for all we know his real net worth might be 20 or even 30 billion dollars. Let me know whether you think peter is the world's greatest investor down below he clearly compounded a large return of 294 million percent, and many don't think that will ever be topped. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button and subscribe and i'll see you in the next one.